Yankees must think out of the box to end pitching disaster

BOSTON — Time for extreme measures.

Bullpenning. Openers. Whatever it takes to get the Yankees out of this full-blown starting pitching meltdown.

For that’s what we are witnessing here at Fenway Park, CC Sabathia’s abbreviated outing the latest domino to fall as the Yankees fell, 9-5, to the Red Sox on Saturday afternoon, their third straight loss to their rivals as the Sawx leapt over the losing Rays to move within eight games of the AL East-leading Yankees.

“We’ve been the reason why we’ve been losing games,” said Sabathia, who allowed five runs in 4¹/₃ innings to take the loss. “We want to turn that around.”

Yes, the trade deadline arrives Wednesday and Brian Cashman surely will bring in arms to help the rotation or bullpen by then. The way the five starters have performed this past week, however, the Yankees will require more than an infusion to set themselves straight. They’ll need something closer to an exorcism.

And what better way to exorcise baseball demons than by embracing new-age methodologies?

First, the latest tally: With his performance, Sabathia actually improved the rotation’s ERA in its past eight outings from 15.61 to 14.90 (53 earned runs in 32 innings pitched) while upping the homer tally to 18 over that span. You know what comes next in this paragraph:

Yeesh.

What should come next for these Yankees? I’m not convinced they’re doomed come October or sooner. This season remains eminently salvageable. Nevertheless, despite Aaron Boone’s commitment to “not overreacting to a bad week of baseball,” they shouldn’t just slog along on the foundation of constancy.

Take Saturday’s game, please. Sabathia, on another downswing in his shaky swan song, allowed three runs in the fourth, putting the Yankees in a 4-2 hole, and he barely made it that far — escaping a first-and-second, two-out jam in the fourth when Jackie Bradley Jr. flew out to Mike Tauchman on the left-field warning track. The Yankees closed it within 4-3 in the top of the fifth on Edwin Encarnacion’s RBI double.

So why not lift Sabathia right there, having completed two trips through the Boston lineup, and go to a fresh arm?

“Any way you slice it at that point, I think we’re up against it,” Boone said. “Now all of a sudden, we’re potentially in a situation where we’re using two to three high-leverage guys where we’re chasing, and then all of a sudden we’ve got guys down tomorrow.

“So did I consider it? Yeah. But I also felt like, as best we could, we needed to try and get them through there. This week’s made it a little bit challenging.”

Understandable … yet predictable, too, that Sabathia, who didn’t get a groundball all day thanks to too many pitches over the heart of the plate, allowed another run in the fifth while notching just one more out.

How about Friday night’s game, the 10-5 Sawx shellacking that began with James Paxton surrendering three runs in the first inning to raise his first-inning ERA for the year to an industry-worst 11.00 among pitchers with 10 or more starts? What if, for Paxton’s next turn, the Yankees deployed an opener and then turned to the Big Maple in the second inning, just as they have done on occasion with the likes of Nestor Cortes Jr. and David Hale? If nothing else, as long as the opener performed reasonably well, Paxton would begin his outing by facing lesser hitters.

“When you go through this, those guys in the bullpen, we’ve tried to stay away from using them too much,” Yankees pitching coach Larry Rothschild said. “Now we’re into guys we’d rather use with leads or tie games just to get through games. It’s a catch-22 right now.”

Perhaps once the presumed trade-deadline additions arrive, the Yankees can be more creative strategically. And once they right themselves and restabilize — their schedule softens soon — then by all means the Yankees should revert to more traditional tactics.

These are not traditional times, though. The Yankees’ cushion is leaking like the Exxon Valdez. They don’t need a miracle. Some medicine will suffice. A shakeup of the traditional approach might just cure the gigantic virus that ails these Yankees.

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